I'm trying to calm myself down again with regards to my friend Gabriel García Márquez. I just started The Autumn of the Patriarch, and have one more of his books to go.
Basically, it doesn't seem fair to expect a modern author to have a concept of form, or to require their concept of sexuality to have continued maturing after high school. It is the essence of modernity that neither of these happen. And it's not my Colombian friend's fault that I heard somewhere that the worldspirit of Literature moved to South America after 1960, so that I approached the books hoping for something more substantial than a Harlequin. And he does do a fairly good job on the political and cultural levels*. He just doesn't know much about love and friendship—again, not his fault that I'm most interested in human nature as revealed in relationships and motivation. It's also not his fault that I get huffy when I feel like my healthy worldview is being subverted. And I am desperate for light reading material, so this is me trying not to be opinionated.
*Not that I'm a good judge: what I know about South America could be written on a 3x5 card, and most of that would be about capybaras, and most of that would be speculations on whether they'd ever been domesticated and if so how willing they are to be hugged†.
†According to Wikipedia: "Capybaras are gentle and will usually allow humans to pet and hand-feed them." Oh boy.
